Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘I notice,’ said the lady, ‘that there is a fire in the salon next door. If you are not too wedded to your tobacco, I shall be grateful for your society.’

‘Oh, madam!’ cried Paul, ‘I am honoured beyond measure.’

And so, when the Baroness had sipped her small liqueur and rose, with a queenly little inclination to the company, Paul rose also, and having opened the door for her, followed her lead into the next apartment, a spacious room, very dimly lighted, and as bare as if it had been made ready for a ball. Here the Baroness established her seat upon a settee, and Paul was encouraged to bring a chair into her neighbourhood, and was there held in discourse. And though he might in the review of later experiences have arrived at the conclusion that Madame la Baronne was a somewhat heartless and not particularly brainy little fribble, he was never able to forget or deny a certain charm of manner which he had not elsewhere encountered, and which had in it a seductive warmth and gentleness. Before he fairly knew it, he was talking with something of the ease and intimacy of an old friend. He had been so sore-hearted of late and so removed from all feminine companionship, that this unexpected, unlooked-for intercourse with a woman of culture and of such undoubted airs of refinement soothed like a poultice. It was water to the thirsty, bread to the hungry heart; it was fire and shelter to the houseless wanderer. Madame drew him into little confidences, all sufficiently simple, harmless, and discreet They related mainly to his methods of work, to his acquaintance with brother men of letters, to incidents of youthful life, to the early hopes and failures of his career.

‘How profoundly interesting!’ Madame purred from time to time. ‘Oh, you men of the people, Mr. Armstrong, you men of the people, how you do surpass and captivate us all when you just happen to have brains!’

The ‘man of the people ‘was certainly making no concealment of his origin, as he certainly never made any parade of it; but he did not quite like this, and perhaps his face revealed as much, for the Baroness hastened with great agility to quit the theme. She began to offer to Paul some little insight into her own history. It would be a prudery, she said, to pretend to be sensitive about it any longer—the whole world knew the sordid and melancholy truth; and this sounded like a prelude to a much fuller explanation than she was for the moment disposed to make, and it helped Paul to understand the hints in which she chose to set forward the fact that she was a person of a lonely heart, that her husband pursued his affairs in Wall Street and elsewhere without her greatly concerning herself as to what those affairs might be, and apparently leaving her much to her own devices. He learned to think afterwards that these confidences, coming upon so very brief an acquaintance, were barely indicative of that exquisite delicacy of soul for which the lady gave herself credit, but it did not occur to him to think so for one moment at the time. The two extra lamps upon the dinner-table had probably been placed there at her own request, but it was beyond dispute that she showed to far greater advantage in the subdued light in which she now sat Time had had no great opportunity of ravishing her good looks as yet, but a certain boldness and bluntness of feature which denied her complete right to beauty was lost here, and her complexion was subdued, so that to the eye of her companion she looked bewitching, and everybody knows how far easier it is to condone a breach of taste in a beautiful woman than in a plain one. But now as the talk went on and grew momentarily more intimate, Paul was made to see that he was in the presence of a suffering heart, that he was speaking with one who had never been able to come into contact with another soul. ‘We live apart from each other, all of us, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said. ‘It is only the artist, only the thinker and dreamer, who cares to grieve over it all; but there is something appalling in the thought that no one soul really touches another. You shake your head,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, but you are young, and you are not yet disillusionized.’

‘I have a right to be in some things,’ Paul said to himself; but he made no verbal answer.

‘No,’ she went on in a tone of tender regret in the pretty purring American voice, which of itself was like the touch of a soft hand. ‘We are born to isolation. As one grows older——’

Paul laughed at that outright It was his first laugh for quite a lengthy space of time, and he enjoyed it.

‘Oh,’ said the lady, taking the implied compliment quite seriously, ‘I am not a centenarian, but I am two-and-thirty, Mr. Armstrong, and in the course of two-and-thirty years one may do a very considerable amount of living. I say it advisedly, as one grows older the recognition of that isolation of which I have spoken grows more and more complete. It beats one down into despair at times; but then one is here for other things than despair: one is here for duty; one is here to suffer, and to gather strength by suffering; that is the whole secret of our destiny. It is simple enough, and yet how long it takes to learn the lesson truly!’

Beyond this no great progress was made on that first evening, but it appeared that the lady had come to stay for at least a little time. It is probable that she had not often found so very responsive an instrument to play upon, for Paul Armstrong’s one lifelong weakness was that any woman of average intelligence, who chose to take the trouble, could sound him through every note of his gamut, and the Baroness de Wyeth seemed to find a lively satisfaction in the exercise of her own power in that direction.